ICANN to vote on domain registration policy

A nonprofit corporation holds a public meeting in Singapore tomorrow to vote on how to spur competition in the ".com" registration market.

January 2, 20024:43 PM PST

The nonprofit corporation charged with overseeing the Net's
core technical underpinnings is holding a public meeting in Singapore tomorrow and likely will vote on proposals to spur competition in the ".com" registration market.

Preceding the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers' (ICANN) public meeting,
its international Government Advisory
Committee met today and endorsed the nonprofit's principles. The
committee represents more than 25 nations, including China, Japan, Mexico,
Sri Lanka, and members of the European Union, the World Intellectual
Property Organization, and the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and
Development.

ICANN was recognized by the Commerce
Department to head a process to privatize administration of the Net's
addressing system and other key functions, thus allowing the U.S. government to get out of the driver's seat.

"Today represented a significant milestone in the establishment of ICANN,"
Australia's Dr. Paul Twomey, chairman of the committee, said in a
statement. "The governments and organizations attending today's meeting
represent the vast majority of Internet users. We saw a broad cross-section
of the community of nations express strong support for the idea that the
Internet is best managed by the Internet community itself."

Over the next two days, ICANN and meeting attendees will discuss several
draft proposals. ICANN is then expected to vote on the plans, which include its
registrar accreditation guidelines.

ICANN is supposed to set up policies that open the door for companies to
compete with Network Solutions (NSI),
which now has an exclusive U.S. government contract to run the lucrative
registry for Net names ending in ".com," ".net," and ".org."

ICANN will select five competing registrars based on the proposed criteria, which then will
test NSI's shared-registration system for a two-month period starting at
the end of April. When the test period is over, NSI is set to open up its
database to all ICANN-accredited registrars by summer.

But NSI, for one, is not happy with the draft accreditation guidelines.

"NSI feels strongly that the overall approach taken by this document is not
in the best interest of the growth of the global Internet and electronic
commerce," NSI's senior vice president Don Telage stated in a letter to ICANN.

"In effect these draft guidelines would: 1) establish ICANN as the global
governance administration for those in the Internet Domain Name System
(DNS) registration business, 2) decide all the most contentious and
difficult policy questions, 3) create a global licensing bureaucracy charged with micromanagement of Internet businesses, and 4) impose an Internet tax on millions of domain owners worldwide to support this structure," the NSI statement concluded.

In addition, the board will review proposed applications for ICANN's
supporting organizations (SO). Per ICANN's bylaws, the SOs will include, for example, representatives from registrars of top-level domains and groups that approve Internet protocols and who will make important recommendations regarding the management of the Internet.

As it is with every step in the process to privatize oversight of the Net, ICANN's latest drafts are not free of controversy.

Some say the comment period was not long enough, in part because ICANN
faces a tremendously tight timeline since being recognized in November.

"It's too much material to digest--there is not enough time to evaluate this," said Larry Erlich, owner of Domain Registry, who hopes to get
his company accredited by ICANN. "How many people have the time or money to
have a representative in Singapore?"

Erlich forwarded his concerns to Esther Dyson, who chairs ICANN's
interim board. He wants to know who will control the InterNIC site, where individuals and
third-party registries sign up domain names.

"Right now, [InterNIC] is controlled by Network Solutions," Erlich
wrote in his public comments. "What is the point of being able to sell books, like
Amazon.com, if all the book traffic goes to the Amazon.com Web site?"

Dyson did respond directly to Erlich's concerns about the time frame in an
email message provided to CNET News.com.

"There are, indeed, quite a lot of comments on the ICANN site by now, and
we'll be getting more in Singapore," she said. "Please rest assured that we
are trying to create a system that will be flexible as the Net itself evolves."